The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg

Front matter

The STRANGE CASE of MISS ANNIE SPRAGG

By Louis Bromfield

Frederick A. Stokes Company New York MCMXXVIII

The Thing Found in the Cesspool

Section I

IT was a broiling afternoon of mid-August in Brinoë and everybody who was anybody had long ago quit its burning pavements and chilly palaces for the mountains or the sea. Left behind there were only stray bands of sweating tourists and a few such remnants of the permanent colony as Mrs. Weatherby and the mysterious companion whom no one had ever met; old Mrs. Whitehead, Mr. Binnop, the curate of the English church, the usual Marchesas and Contessas, thick as flies, and Mr. Augustus John Winnery. Except Mrs. Weatherby all these stayed in baking Brinoë for the same reason. (The old Contessa Salverini put up her shutters and lived in the back of her house, giving out word that she had gone to Montecatini for the cure, and receiving all her letters by arrangement with the poste restante of Montecatini.) None of them would have given you the real reason. They stayed because they could not leave their beloved Brinoë or because they were engaged in some work of an archæological or literary nature which forced them to remain. The real reason was that they were all too poor to leave.

In the case of Mr. Winnery, he could not leave because he was engaged upon a colossal work which already had taken up the greater part of his life. It was called "Miracles and Other Natural Phenomena." In speaking of this work he always placed a profound emphasis on the word natural lest you should think that he was taken in by such nonsense as miracles. He was a small, bald man of fifty-two and a quarter of a century earlier he had written parodies and light verse which had appeared now and then in the Yellow Book. But a kind of blight had fallen early on his literary career and for years now he had been devoting his none too great energies to demolishing the idea of miracles in general and the legends clustered about the saints in particular.

His work kept him in Brinoë. It had kept him there for twenty-nine previous and consecutive summers, and it was not yet completed. (Indeed, only Mr. Winnery knew that it was still in a chaotic stage, consisting almost entirely of huge accumulations of notes and copyings from various little-known books on the saints.) Still, it served its purpose, and year after year it continued to give him a faint echo of that fleeting glory which he had known as a young literary radical. Old Mrs. Whitehead and those Anglo-Saxon Marchesas and Contessas who had not become more Catholic than the Blackest Black still spoke of Mr. Winnery's work with a kind of awe. Mr. Binnop, the curate, who prided himself on being broadminded, did not mention the work at all, but he did not, on the other hand, allow it to interfere with his friendship with Mr. Winnery.

And now in the scalding heat of the August mid-afternoon Mr. Winnery was driving in a decrepit fiacre up the long winding road that led to the heights of Monte Salvatore. He cursed the heat and himself and Mrs. Weatherby, Miss Annie Spragg, the coachman and Brinoë itself—sacred, beautiful, romantic Brinoë, surrounded by blue hills covered with clouds of blue violets and fragrant narcissus. Of course, thought Mr. Winnery bitterly, the poetic temperament always chose to write about Brinoë in May and never in August. Now if a scientist, a realist, had written of Brinoë, it would have been another story. He hated Brinoë, not because it actually lacked all the miraculous qualities attributed to it by Browning, Longfellow and the advertisements of the tourist agencies, but because he had to live there. Poverty and inertia had chained him to Brinoë for twenty-nine years and now at fifty-two he saw no prospect of escaping from it even in death. In the end he would be laid to rest, after a service read by Mr. Binnop (who read the service so badly) in the Protestant cemetery. It would have to be the Protestant cemetery because there was no special cemetery for agnostics. He would rest in death among all the poets, spinsters, retired colonels, widows, decayed clergymen and adulteresses who since the eighteenth century had lived and died among the exaggerated beauties of Brinoë. Probably he would be laid to rest beside old Mrs. Whitehead. Perhaps even in her grave she would rattle her false teeth over her dish of tea. Doubtless she would be buried with a collected edition of "Ouida" placed at the head of her coffin.

The fiacre moved in a cloud of yellow dust. Yellow dust covered the black cypresses and the grey olive trees and the blue-black ilex that wilted against walls turned a bilious yellow by the unrelenting sun. "Ah," thought Mr. Winnery bitterly, "the beautiful blue cloudless sky of Italy. Italy, land of laughter and sunshine. Ha! Ha!" But it was worse than that, for added to the baking sun there was a hot wind from Africa. It had been blowing steadily for two days, having sprung up on the night of Miss Annie Spragg's death. It bore on its restless bosom clouds of dust and heat from the Sahara all the way across the blue Mediterranean to the foothills of the Alps. You wakened in the morning to see the trees on the hills above Brinoë swaying in what appeared to be a cool fresh breeze and then you thrust your shutters open to find that it was a wind charged with the heat of all Inferno. And quickly you clapped the shutters tight again, feeling slightly insane.

The driver of the fiacre smelled of sweat and garlic and beat his bony horses from time to time with the butt of his whip across their already scarred and blistered rumps. "Ah," thought Mr. Winnery bitterly, "these gay, kindly, carefree Italians. Children of Nature." (So read the tourist circulars.) He fell to cursing Ruskin and Browning. "Where you rest, there decorate," wrote Mr. Ruskin. (He was not sure that he had the quotation correctly, but that was the idea.) The Italians never stopped decorating. It was their passion for decoration that had induced them to cover the seat of the fiacre with great excrescences of soiled imitation filet lace. The seat was at least black. You would not have noticed the dirt. Or if they must decorate, why did they not wash the decorations from time to time?

Mr. Winnery was a bachelor and wore yellow gloves to keep microbes from his plump pink hands.

Fifty-two years of bachelordom had induced a certain inflexible routine into his manner of living. For at least twenty years he had lived in the same rooms, eaten the same food, risen and gone to bed at the same hours, always found his cigarettes in the same spot and his books where he had last put them down. He had sent off his querulous book reviews and his fashionable correspondence to the Ladies' Own World at exactly the same day by exactly the same post. On Thursdays he went to the Principessa Bologna's, on Mondays to Mrs. Whitehead's, and on Wednesdays to the Marchesa Barducci's.

Today he had shattered the routine for the first time in order to torture himself with the long drive to Mrs. Weatherby's villa. When he had gone more than half-way he told himself that he had simply gone insane with heat and boredom; but having already suffered a really colossal discomfort it did not seem worth while to turn back. In the cool of the evening the journey would be an easier one. At least it could not be more uncomfortable.

The only concrete reason he could discover for the temporary outburst of insanity was a desire to know something of Miss Annie Spragg, and Mrs. Weatherby appeared to be the only person in all Italy, or all the world, for that matter, who knew anything of her. Mr. Winnery was out in the sun in the interests of science.

Section II

For twenty-nine years he had been writing his colossal work and now for the first time a miracle had occurred, as one might have said, just beneath his nose. It was the miracle of the stigmata. In death an eccentric old maid, who lived in one room of the ruined old rookery known as the Palazzo Gonfarini, had received the marks of the Crucifixion. It was the miracle of Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Catherine of Siena. Three persons had witnessed it, besides all the mob that broke in afterward to carry off as relics all the furniture and even the clothes of Miss Annie Spragg; these witnesses were a nun known as Sister Annunziata, a priest called Father Baldessare and the janitress of the tenement, a bawdy, irreligious, anti-clerical Socialist shrew, who called herself Signora Bardelli.

Here, Mr. Winnery told himself, was a perfect laboratory specimen of a miracle. He might investigate and pull it apart to his heart's content. It was not, Mr. Winnery told himself, a very rare miracle. It was always happening somewhere. There were more than a hundred such cases on record. Only last month there had been a sausage-maker's daughter in Bavaria. . . . And there were only two cases which had been recognized as authentic and one of these at least—that of Saint Catherine of Siena—he looked upon as dubious. No one but Saint Cath- erine herself had witnessed the scars because she had prayed that they be made invisible to others. And then, as he pointed out in his work, she had also a great motive in the rivalry between the Franciscans, who claimed the miracle for the founder of their order, and the Dominicans, of which she was in reality, if not in name, the head. Pope Sixtus IV had issued a decree at that time giving a monopoly of the miracle to Saint Francis and making it a censurable offense to mention Saint Catherine's experience as authentic. Saint Catherine, Mr. Winnery thought, was a powerful but not a very original woman.

But Miss Annie Spragg was neither Dominican nor Franciscan. Indeed, no one seemed to know whether she was anything at all.

For at least fifteen years Miss Annie Spragg had been one of the sights of Brinoë, like the Etruscan excavations, and so Winnery had seen her countless times. But it was not until she was dead that he, in common with the rest of the world, learned her name. Today it was a name printed in newspapers all over the world. . . . In Paris, New York, Milan, Bombay, Copenhagen. . . . Tired journalists had arrived in Brinoë from Rome and Paris and Milan to report upon the mysterious happening.

For at least fifteen years Miss Annie Spragg had wandered the streets regardless of heat or cold, storm or sunshine—an eccentric old maid whom the Italians looked upon merely as one of the phenomena of a generous Nature, and whom the foreign colony resented as something a little shameful. She seemed never to have had but one costume. This consisted of a bedraggled but miraculously serviceable suit of tweed with a skirt which trailed the ground alike in dust and mud, and a large flowered picture hat on which the roses, from the constant assault of the brilliant Italian sunlight, had long since lost the glory of their original aniline mauves and magentas. Over this hat she wore a thick black veil and always on her hands she wore white cotton gloves.

So little was known of her that in death there seemed no one who was certain even of her nationality. One of the two Brinoë newspapers (bitter rivals of each other) described her as "Miss Annie Spragg, born at Newcastle-on-Tino (sic), England,"—a quite natural mistake due to the conviction of all Italians that anyone eccentric must be English. It was the mysterious Mrs. Weatherby who stepped forward and corrected that impression. In bad Italian she tactlessly addressed a letter to the rival paper pointing out with some nationalistic feeling that Miss Annie Spragg was certainly not English, but American, and that she had once been a resident of Winnebago Falls, Iowa, a city of which Mrs. Weatherby was herself a native. Mrs. Weatherby wrote that she had recognized the old maid soon after coming to Brinoë when she encountered her one day in the Piazza San Giovanni. The letter was signed Henrietta Weatherby (Mrs. Alonzo Weatherby), Villa Leonardo, Monte Salvatore.

Mrs. Weatherby was herself, Mr. Winnery believed, something of an eccentric. In winter and in the spring she was to be seen driving about the town in a fiacre, clad all in white, with a flowing white veil. In season she frequently carried a bouquet of tuberoses. She was a middle-aged woman of powerful build and in the circles frequented by Mr. Winnery it was said that she was a seeress and contemplated founding a new and what she chose to call an "eclectic" religion. In May it was her habit to retire to the Villa Leonardo in a lonely valley some miles beyond Monte Salvatore for the sake, it was said, "of meditation and soul growth." Old Mrs. Whitehead, who sought out every newcomer at least once, reported an encounter with Mrs. Weatherby which left her confused and baffled, owing, she said, to the spiritual cast which Mrs. Weatherby insisted upon giving to their brief conversation.

She was always accompanied by a plump and youngish woman dressed in black who appeared to be a sort of companion-secretary. No one had ever heard the name of this lady and she had had speech with no one. It was rumored that she was a deaf-mute.

Section III

As the fiacre reached the crest of Monte Salvatore Mr. Winnery's nerves became worn to a fine edge. He began even to think gloomily of suicide. His whole life, he told himself, had been a failure. He had attained the age of fifty-two without anything having happened to him. He had known neither love nor love's twin sister passion, and of late the thought of the experiences which he had overlooked troubled him profoundly. It was becoming a kind of neurasthenia. On its philosophic side he found the thought terrifying. It meant that he had missed the most important of human experiences. Perhaps, he told himself, that was what the world found lacking in his work; a touch of passion might have made him popular if not distinguished. On the physical side of the question it had occurred to him lately that the attainment of such experience had not yet become an impossibility.

He was, he supposed, at that period which people called in capital letters the Dangerous Age in Men. And lately he had noticed a certain physical change in himself, as though some gland too long inactive had begun at last to perform its functions. He who had always been a thin, fragile little man began to grow heavier and feel stronger. Even his liver seemed to trouble him less. He had begun to experience the growth of a new force and vitality which at times shook him like a fever. He supposed it was that new force which had driven him out today in the burning heat. On the intellectual side he had begun to have a curiosity about life which was altogether new and quite disturbing. It made him feel uneasy and restless, but although he slept less well, the lack of sleep did not appear in his new-found vigor to trouble him. Until the age of fifty-two he had been a literary and classical writer who wrote of love only in its more refined aspects.

The carriage reached the square of Monte Salvatore (that romantic Monte Salvatore of which he had dreamed in his Victorian youth and which now looked a bilious yellow and smelled badly). It passed through the baking streets and began to slip down the opposite side of the hill into another pocket-like valley filled to the brim with dust and heat. Why, Mr. Winnery asked himself, should anyone exchange the heat of this valley for that of the other in the belief that it was cooler here or that the air was any better. No one but a fool like this Mrs. Weatherby. . . .

As the fiacre descended into the second valley Winnery was forced to admit to himself that it did seem cooler here. The trees appeared thicker and less jaded and the dust less overwhelming, though that may have been only because the road was rarely used. They ascended for a time and then began a descent so sharp that the fiacre pressed close against the buttocks of the bony horses, and presently on turning a corner the driver turned and in a wave of garlic exclaimed with an operatic gesture, "Behold the Villa Leonardo."

There was no villa to be seen, but only an island of dark thick trees clinging to the side of the mountain and leading up to it a long avenue of venerable oaks. As they drew near, it became evident that the narrow road ended at the villa itself and had no other reason for existence. The clump of trees was like a patch of black sewn upon the side of the grey and yellow hill. There was no other building of any sort near it. Indeed, thought Winnery, it must be impossible to see from there any human habitation. (He was a gentleman given to rather pompous language, who had known his great flowering in the day of the mot juste.) It did seem cooler here, though it may have been only the sense of isolation that enveloped the ancient villa.

On either side of the long straight drive leading up to the house stood pillars of reddish stone, each surmounted by a panther and a goat with a serpent at their feet. The panther and the goat held between them a shield upon which no arms had ever been cut. So damaged were the figures by time and weather that a less antiquarian eye than Mr. Winnery's would not have known them for what they were. Straight ahead the avenue lost itself in the shadows of gnarled and ancient trees which hung closely over the road.

After they had gone a little way, the villa itself came into view—a commonplace yellowish villa set among cypresses and olive trees with a flat façade ornamented in the fashion of Spanish rather than Italian baroque. It had an unkempt look with its shutters all closed against the heat and the shrubbery all scraggly and unpruned. At the door, just beside a large clump of sword-like yuccas, stood a smart motor painted black with a delicate red stripe running about the top. It was an eccentric, Latin and expensive car, shining with too much polished metal and too many elegant appurtenances, of the kind known as une voiture de grand sport. The sight of it tended to raise the spirits of Mr. Winnery. It meant that he would not be compelled to encounter the formidable Mrs. Weatherby alone.

As he came nearer still, he saw that a part of the villa on the side next to the valley had been built upon a sort of terrace foundation of a much older period. This, Mr. Winnery saw, was of Roman construction. It might be that underneath it lay an even more ancient foundation of Etruscan origin.

"Extremely interesting," he murmured, so loudly that the driver turned as if in expectation of an order and then saw at once that his fare was thinking of other things.

The house was placed so that it commanded a superb view of the lonely valley, a view indeed which one would never have suspected from the approach. Perhaps, he thought, it had been chosen in the beginning by some Roman for its sense of space, a thing so rare in the crowded valleys about Brinoë. At the very bottom of the valley there was a yellow line tracing the course of a freshet, now completely dry in the heat of mid-August. And suddenly he felt suffocated once more and choking with dust.

The carriage stopped before the door and Mr. Winnery, after putting on his yellow gloves and endeavoring vainly to brush the thick dust from his clothing, went up the steps and pulled a copper bell-handle made in the form of a ram's head and covered by a patine of verdigris. There was an answering tinkle of a bell, but no other evidence of life. He rang again and then again with no more success, and suddenly he was aware that the driver was looking at him with an expression of malice as if he said, "You forced me to come all the way out here in the heat for nothing." It was a perfectly blank expression, but touched with insinuation. It made Mr. Winnery suddenly angry and embarrassed. It reminded him how he detested Italians as a race. He pulled violently and the bell answered again with a mocking violence. Then he turned and saying, "Wait for me here," came down the steps and took a grass-grown path that led through a tangle of ivy and cypress hedge toward the back of the house.

Section IV

For more than a hundred feet Winnery made his way through a sort of tunnel of foliage, so thick that even at this season the earth beneath his feet seemed damp and moist, and then all at once he came upon the most extraordinary and beautiful garden. It was large and square in size and so placed upon the artificially raised terrace that it seemed to hang in space above the valley. The garden was entirely of greenery, a sort of vast chamber of which roof and walls were made of foliage. There was no flower of any sort. The villa itself made one wall and the other three sides were entirely closed by the thick walls of ancient cypresses of a size Winnery had never seen save at Tivoli. Near the ground where the cypresses had no foliage, light, reflected from the grey and yellow valley below, filtered in between the ancient grey trunks. Over the whole garden there was a living roof made by the branches of countless plane trees planted to form colonnades and so trimmed and trained that their yellowing leaves shut out all heat and light. Within this area the sun never penetrated and there was no grass but only a carpet of red clay flecked here and there by patches of moss which in the extraordinary light had turned an unreal and poisonous shade of green. It was as if in the entire parched and desolate valley, life, green and exuberant, flourished only within this enclosure.

At first he had thought the garden empty, too, and silent like the house, but after a moment, when his eyes had grown accustomed to the fierce blaze of hot light from the valley below, he discovered a group of figures at the far end. There appeared to be several servants and working men, and four women, of whom one, a vision of fluttering white, was unmistakably the seeress, Mrs. Weatherby. There was also a tall gentleman dressed all in black, with silver hair. They stood gathered about a hole which appeared to be the termination of a long trench freshly cut from the direction of the villa itself. The damp red clay lay heaped about their feet. And then as he approached he discovered the object of their scrutiny—something which appeared to be the size and shape of a man and which was flecked and discolored by the clay.

"Ah," thought Mr. Winnery. "They have been digging a cesspool."

It was the smallish plump woman in black who first noticed him and spoke to Mrs. Weatherby. The seeress turned and came toward him. She did not walk; she floated in an artificial and gracious manner which made him know at once that she had practiced this walk for many years. She was a heavy woman not without a certain handsomeness due to her size and her majestic carriage. As she drew near she held out her hand and, exposing an array of flashing, healthy teeth in a practiced smile, said, "Mr. Winnery, I presume."

And Winnery, fixing his face determinedly into a smile, murmured, "It was good of you to let me come, Mrs. Weatherby."

Together they turned toward the others.

"I am afraid there was no one to answer the bell. We had all come out here, even the servants. We have just made a remarkable discovery. While digging a new cesspool, the workmen unearthed a statue. We have been unable to identify it. It seems to me a very strange statue."

In the back of his mind Winnery kept thinking, "I loathe this woman because she is refined and because she is so healthy and therefore so entirely out of place here." Because he had a liver, healthy people full of vitality had long been abhorrent to him, like people who whistle and sing in their morning tubs.

He was then introduced, first to a tall, handsome but rather battered woman of fifty, dressed smartly and much too youthfully in clothes which by their simplicity and cut bore the mark of the most expensive of Paris dressmakers. The woman had for him a faint air of familiarity. It was a face he had seen somewhere, the face of a woman of fifty which has been much worked over. She wore a great many bracelets and a string of real pearls.

"Principessa d'Orobelli," murmured Mrs. Weatherby, with a quiver of satisfaction. And then Mr. Winnery knew. She was one of those brilliant birds of passage whose photographs taken at the Lido surrounded by naked young men, whose names were of no importance, appeared from time to time in the illustrated weeklies. Although he had never seen her before, he had written many paragraphs for the Ladies' Own World concerning her movements hither and yon across the face of Italy. She was the smart, the almost notorious, d'Orobelli.

"And Father d'Astier," murmured Mrs. Weatherby with a pleased and gracious nod in the direction of the silver-haired gentleman. Father d'Astier bowed, a tall, handsome man with intense black eyes, a fine nose and a splendid rather sensual mouth, a figure at sixty possessed of great vigor and distinction. Winnery knew of him, too, a priest without any parish save all of God's world, who lunched and dined "everywhere." He had a simple mission in life: it was to convert the rich who married impoverished titles and to help on their way to grace any others of considerable wealth who felt a leaning toward Rome. He was a confessor to many fashionable and scandalous ladies, to great bankers and members of decayed royal families. Old stories of Father d'Astier and "the d'Orobelli" (as Winnery thought of her), heard at secondhand through years, rolled through the back of his mind. For an instant it gave him a pleasant, warm sense of moving in the great world.

"And Miss Fosdick," concluded Mrs. Weatherby with a slight and careless gesture as if she were tossing a piece of dirt over her shoulder. The gesture indicated the plump, shy little woman dressed in black who stood in the background with a touching air of timidity. This, of course, was Mrs. Weatherby's companion, the deaf-mute. Out of the corner of his eye, Winnery saw how she hovered in the background, almost tremulously, obscured by that figure all in white which seemed at once so vaporous and so solid. Miss Fosdick was like shadow. She was shy too and frightened like a bird. Mr. Winnery felt a sudden wave of pity for her.

"What an awful life!" he thought.

While they had been talking a workman appeared coming down one of the long light-flecked corridors of the garden, carrying in each hand a pail of water. In his wide belt of black elastic was thrust a scrubbing-brush. He was a young man, dark and black-eyed, who wore blue trousers stained with the red clay and a checkered shirt open to expose his dark sunburned chest. Winnery, who through years of boredom had come to amuse himself at desperate moments by watching the sly, half-concealed actions of people, saw Princess d'Orobelli's eye rove over the masculine young figure. Herodias, he thought. The workman knelt down and with the scrubbing-brush began to remove the patches of red clay from the freshly disinterred statue.

They stood about watching while the statue, slightly pitted here and there by the action of acids hidden in the sour ground of the dark garden, emerged in all the beauty of its time-worn creamy white marble. Princess d'Orobelli whispered something to Father d'Astier. One of the maidservants giggled and was silenced at once by a glance of venom from Mrs. Weatherby, who had clearly determined to regard this as a sacred moment.

Priapus himself had risen from the mouldering soil of the ancient garden.

Whatever hand carved the figure had moved with understanding and passion. The statue carried in every line a kind of quivering voluptuousness. The very curves of the muscles and the line of the back and hips quivered between the realms of ecstasy and that disgust which follows quickly upon satiety. It was a glorification of sensuality. Indeed, the sculptor had done his work so well that for a long time the little group about the excavation stood awed into silence, as if something had risen from the red clay which roused disturbing memories in those who were experienced and disturbing intimations in those who had remained until that moment virginal. No one could have remained entirely chaste after looking upon the statue.